Records Management

Records Management and Retention Lifecycle Policy – Organizations are experiencing growth of both must-keep documents in addition to irrelevant information, with increased vulnerability in defining which content is or is not a formal record. Archive Studio simplifies electronic records management so that everyone, including the average knowledge worker, can easily classify and declare documents as records. As new records are entered, retention policies are immediately associated with each specific document for possible legal holds and eventual destruction based upon industry retention rules.WebSearch provides fully-automated, industry-standard document retention. Record types (typically a combination of document library and document type) are associated with document expiration policies. Additional support is provided for the enforcement of litigation holds on document expiration, reporting, destruction and off-line storage.

The basic concepts of document retention are:

• Record group – A logical grouping of documents reflecting the groups within an organization (e.g. departments). For purposes of WebSearch each document library constitutes a Record Group (the two terms are virtually synonymous – and in all cases the name of the Record Group is simply the name of the library).
• Record series – Defines the types of document under retention management within a particular record group.
• Record type – The combination of a record group and record series associated with a document. Record types are specific to an organization.
• Retention rule – An expression that specifies when a document of a particular record type is to be tagged for destruction or off-line removal.
• Litigation hold – An event (most often a legal matter) that pre-empts the normal disposition of documents after their normal retention criteria has been realized.
• Creation Date – The date when the document was created (which is not necessarily the date the document was initially added to WebSearch).
• Filing Date – The date when the document was added to WebSearch.
• Effective Date – The date from when the retention period becomes effective (when the retention period begins).
• Expiration Date – The date when the document is set to expire based on its document retention criteria.
• Archival – The off-line movement of expired documents to the regular file system prior to deletion.
• Deletion – The deletion of a document from WebSearch such that its information could possibly be recovered from the system with forensics tools (faster than shredding).
• Shredding – The removal of a document from WebSearch such that its contents could not be recovered with computer forensics tools.

Document Expiration and Off-line Archive Overview

Each organization defined in a WebSearch installation will establish its document disposition and off-line archival policy. This policy will specify that one of the three following dispositions will apply to all documents as they expire:

• delete – the document is simply deleted from WebSearch, with all individuals with appropriate notifications being notified.
• shred – the document is shreded from WebSearch, with all individuals with appropriate notifications being notified.
• archive/delete – the document is written in archive format to the archive directory and deleted from WebSearch.
• archive/shred – the document is written in archive format to the archive directory and shredded.